Liberty

Crediting Co-Authorship

Michelangelo Landgrave Comments, Culture, Liberty ,

“… Who worked with you”

“Didn’t you know? It was Tamwile Elar. He worked out the theory that made the device possible and I designed and build the actual instrument.”

“Does that mean he took the credit, Dr. Monay?”

“No, no. You mustn’t think that. Dr. Elar is not that kind of man. He gave me full credit for my share of the work. In fact, it was his idea to call the device by our names – both our names – but he couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, that’s Professor Seldon’s rule, you know. All devices and equations are to be given functional names and not personal ones – to avoid resentment.”

-Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Most of my research is co-authored. As I noted in my previous post, I strongly believe that science is a collaborative enterprise. I of course have a few solo authored working papers, mainly those that I hope to include in my dissertation, but for the most part my work is with others. A problem with this is deciding how to credit the paper. Who gets the prized first author spot? Is it the most senior member of the team? The person who came up with the initial idea? The former RA who got upgraded to co-author status to avoid having to pay them? All of these can be tricky and can lead to resentment among co-authors.

I’ve seen various alternative arrangements to try to side step the issue. There are those who list co-authors by alphabetical order or alternate first authorship (Landgrave & Christensen 2015, Christensen & Landgrave 2016, etc etc). A few, like my grand advisor, combine their names with frequent co-authors (e.g. McNollgast). As cool as Christgrave sounds, I think these alternatives ultimately fall short because they continue to personalize science. It’s not clear to me what the benefit of this is. Not only does this lead to resentment among co-authors but it, I think, slows down the revision process as people mis-interpret critic on a given idea as a personal attack.

It is entirely possible, for example, to dislike JM Keynes’ work but to be indifferent or even warm towards the man himself. Likewise, it is possible to praise someone’s work, but find them to be personally awful.

Would it not be better to refer to papers by institutions or ‘labs’? Coase’s theory of the firm would, for example, be referred to as LSE 1937, as opposed to Coase 1937.

Thoughts? Comments? As always, write in the comments section!

#microblogging

Ottomanism, Nationalism, Republicanism III

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Previous posts in this series have looked at the preconditions for the proclamation of the Republic of  Turkey in 1923. The Ottoman Empire was in a very difficult situation from the early 19th century, effectively lacking the capacity to prevent erosion of its territory, extraterritorial legal rights for the stronger Great Powers which were extended to non-Muslim subjects the powers claimed to protect, and ‘mediation’ regarding break away groups within the Empire. The survival of the Empire was certainly in doubt by 1914 and World War One killed it, along with three other empires: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In a more long term way, the war hastened the end of colonial European empires, though the French and British Empires gained territory from the Paris Peace Treaties.

It is hard to see how the Ottoman Empire could have survived except as a rump state, even without the war. It might have been smaller than the current republic and certainly would not have been larger. Had its German and Austro-Hungarian allies won the war, it would have survived with some territorial gains in north Africa, but as an effective dependency of Germany.

Defeat in the war destroyed the power of the Trio (Enver, Talat and Cemal) of military and bureaucratic figures who ran the Empire under the continuing nominal sovereignty of the Sultan in a secretive and unaccountable manner. They came of the Committee of Union Progress, the political party expression of the Young Turks who came to power in 1908. The methods of the trio are the culmination of the rapid movement of the CUP from a constitutional party to a conspiratorial and authoritarian political force: Kemal Atatürk was a member of the CUP but resigned because of its lack of republican radicalism, with perhaps some motivation from more personal kinds of dispute.

As World War I ended in 1918, the Sultan regained powers and followed a policy of appeasement towards Britain, continuing the logic of earlier dependency on Germany, that is the logic in which the state could only survive through appeasement of at least one Great Power. The government was superficially more liberal than what came before, but had so little basis in the residual Empire it’s hard to see any circumstance in which it would not have collapsed or resorted to state violence to replace the power of Britain, which was occupying Istanbul.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres gave all the remaining Arab provinces to Britain and France, who also occupied parts of Anatolia along with Italy and Greece (which was given most of eastern Thrace). An American backed Armenian state was envisaged in eastern Anatolia and a confederation of Kurdish majority provinces in the southeast with the British mandate in Mesopotamia-Iraq. As far as the elements of the Ottoman elite influenced by nationalism and republicanism were concerned, particularly those who were, or had been, active in the CUP this was entirely unacceptable, leaving a rump Ottoman state in the central and northern parts of Anatolia, separated from Istanbul in the southeast, the east, the south, and the west. A Greek invasion of Izmir and other parts of the west to enforce its Sèvres gains met with armed force.

Though the Ottoman state appeared to be completely defeated and helpless, the CUP had left a legacy of public and conspiratorial political and security organisation which led to considerable resistance. A general known as Mustafa Kemal Paşa, later Kemal Atatürk, was able to leave Istanbul and join up with anti-Sèvres forces in the east, under cover of ‘inspection’ of Ottoman forces, possibly with the connivance of elements of the residual Sultan regime. Atatürk’s strength of personality and political vision, along with military prestige from the Battle of Gallipoli, enabled him to become the military and political leader of these forces, so that a secularist radical vanguardist republican was at the head of a national assembly full of traditional Ottoman Muslims.

The consequences of this formative national movement (which had Kurdish as well as Turkish support) was that Mustafa Kemal was able to defeat the Greek expansion into Anatolia, push other occupying forces out, and that he was able to insist on a replacement for the Treaty of Sèvres, which is the Treaty of Lausanne. The whole process continued the ethnic violence which marked movements of rebellion against the Ottoman Empire and state counter-violence. It is very had to see how any postwar Ottoman or republican state could have avoided the continuation of early ethnic violence.

The republican regime emerged from a national movement against ethnically inspired partition and occupation, so was not going to aim for a consociational or federalist state to get ethnic groups to share a state. It was not even going to aim for pluralism within a unitary state. Turkish republicanism was based on nationalism, and ethnic nationalism at that, as the only likely basis for an enduring state. The means by which this was obtained during the War of Independence and the early republican regime were ugly, but the alternative was ugly attacks on Anatolian Muslims, principally Turks and then Kurds.

With all due respect to the dangers of ‘whataboutery’, the process in which parts of the Ottoman state kept breaking away to form Christian majority states was no more pleasant. The same applies to the Russian annexation of what had been Ottoman lands in the Caucasus, which appears to have led to the killing of one million, or more, Cherkez (Circassian) Muslims.

From the time of  Albanian revolts of the early years of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was beginning to part ways with its Muslim population outside Anatolia and Thrace. The conflict between Arabs and the Ottoman state was extremely ugly on both sides. As I have mentioned, the Austria-Hungary fragmentation at the end of the First World War was unique in not leaving a state which represented the core of the Empire.

It is not an easy subject, but the evidence of the First World War and the 1920s is that a state needs some kind of core nationality and territory to survive, which we see even in a the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state, which had Serbs at its core. In Turkey the ethnic core of Turks, in alliance with a lesser number of Kurds and various ethnicities including Cherkez and Bosnşian which had been refugees from the post-Ottoman states, based in the territorial core of Anatolia, provided a basis for a national movement. The national movement was strongly influenced at elite levels by republican ideas of unified popular will, which could fit with nationalism.

To be continued

Ottomanism, Nationalism, Republicanism II

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the last post, I gave some historical background on how the Ottoman state, whether in reformist or repressive mode (or some combination of the two), was on a road, at least from the early nineteenth century, that was very likely to end in a nation-state for the Turks of Anatolia and the Balkan region of Thrace, which forms a hinterland in its eastern part for the part of Istanbul on the Balkan side of the Bosphorus. Despite the centuries of the Ottoman dynasty (the founder Othman was born in 1299 and this is usually taken as the starting point of the Ottoman state, though obviously there was no such thing when Othman was born), it was also an increasing possibility that the nation-state would be a republic on the French model.

The obvious alternative being a style of monarchism mixing populism and (rather constructed) tradition, born out of a national movement and accommodating the idea of a popular will represented by the monarch, mixed in varying degrees with constitutional and representative institutions. The clearest example of this style is maybe Serbia, to which can be added Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. The older monarchies of imperial Germany and Russia incorporated elements of populist-national monarchy. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the Habsburg empire based in Vienna for many centuries became known in 1867, was the Empire most lacking in a core and not surprisingly suffered the most complete disintegration after World War One (that great killer of Empires).

France was the exception in Europe as a republic, particularly as a unitary republic, and was only continuously a republic from 1870. In 1870, Switzerland was the only other republic, but known as the Swiss Confederation, with strong powers for the constituent cantons. The example of French republicanism was still supremely important because of the transformative nature of the 1789 French Revolution, and the ways its development became central events in European history. Part of that came out of the preceding status of France as the premier European nation and the biggest cultural force of the continent. Educated Ottomans were readers of French, and Ottoman political exiles were often in Paris.

High level education often meant studying in Paris. This had such a big influence on the fine arts, including architecture, that apparently 19th century architecture in Istanbul was more based on French Orientalism than earlier Ottoman architecture. The religious conservatives and neo-Ottomanists in power today, who claim to represent authenticity and escape from western models, in reality promote imitation of these 19th century imports.

Ottoman intellectuals and writers read French and were familiar with the idea of France as intellectual and political leader. There were other influences, including important relations with Imperial Germany, but French influence had a particular status for those aiming for change.

Namık Kemal, the ‘Young Ottoman’ reformer who has some continuing appeal to the moderate political right in Turkey, as demonstrated in the foundation of a Namık Kemal University in Thrace 4 years after the AKP came to power, appearing more moderate conservvative than it does now, translated Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws into Ottoman Turkish (modern Turkish is based on major changes from Ottoman).

The more radical reformers who came to power in 1908 were known as Young Turks, that is Jeunes Turcs, often now written in half-Turkish, half-French style as Jön Türkler. The more radical reformers wanted less role for Islam in public life and at the most radical end even regarded Islam as responsible for backwardness. French laicism was therefore a natural pole of attraction, as were the ways nationalism and republicanism came together in the French revolutionary legacy as an expression of the sovereignty of the people.

The Ottomans studying in France were strong influenced by the sociology of Emile Durkheim, who is usually counted as one of the three founders of the discipline of sociology, along with Karl Marx and Max Weber. Durkheim’s social thought was very influenced by an understanding of Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as precursors of sociology. This partly reflects the social analysis they engaged in, but also their idea of how a society is constituted legally and politically, particularly Rousseau’s theory of the social contract. Durkheim’s social thought is permeated by concerns with what kind of social solidarity there can be in modern societies in ways which build on the long history of republican thinking about a community of citizens. This was very important in the late Ottoman and early republican period.

The German

Max Weber was also a major influence. His ideas about disenchantment (a version of secularisation) and the role of the nation-state were of definite interest to Turkish thinkers inclined towards republicanism, nationalism, and secularism. One of the consequences of this is that criticisms of the Turkish republican tradition, as it passed through Kemal Atatürk (‘Kemalism’), are tied up with criticisms of Weber. Some of this Turkish absorption of Durkheim and Weber can be found in English in the work of Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924) and Niyazi Berkes (1908-1988).

It is also worth finding Atatürk’s Great Speech of 1927 (a book length text read out over several days), which is a political intervention not a discussion of social theory, but does show how ideas connected with social theory enter political discourse in Turkey. It is very widely distributed in Turkey, I’ve even seen it on sale in Turkish supermarkets; and it has been translated into English. Berkes is the social scientist and has a rather more academic way of writing than Gökalp (a famously ambiguous thinker) or Atatürk. His The Development of Secularism in Turkey (published in English 1964, while he was working at McGill University in Montreal) must be the single most influential work of social science by a Turk or about Turkey.

Unfortunately a discussion  of republicanism in relation to Durkheim, Weber, or any other major thinkers declined after the 1920s and Berkes is really the last great flowering of this tradition in Turkey. This is part of the story of how Turkish republicanism as a mode of thinking declined into defensive gestures and the repetition of dogmas, so is also the history of how extremely superficial gestures towards liberalism by leaders of the Turkish right had undue influence over the more liberal parts of Turkish thinking.

The weakness of thought about republicanism and the superficial absorption of liberalism was the main thread on the intellectual side leading to the disaster of Erdoğan-AKP rule. The rise of AKP was welcomed by many (I suspect most, but I don’t know any ways in which this has been quantified) Turkish liberals until the suppression of the Gezi movement in 2013 and even in some cases until the wave of repression following the coup attempt of 2016.

To be continued

Ottomanism, Republicanism, Nationalism I

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

The Republican experiment in Turkey goes back formally to 1923, when Mustafa Kemal (later Kemal Atatürk) proclaimed the Republic of Turkey after the deposition of the last Ottoman Sultan, becoming the first President of the Republic after holding the office of Speaker of the National Assembly. The office of Caliph (commander of the faithful), which had a symbolic universalism for Muslim believers world wide and was held by the Ottoman dynasty, was abolished in the following year. The Republic, as you would expect in the early 20s, was founded on intensely nationalistic grounds, creating a nation for Turks distinct from the Ottoman system which was created in an era of religiously defined and personalised rule rather than ethnic-national belonging.

The move in a republican-national direction can be taken back to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which itself put down a counterrevolution in 1909, and might be taken as a model for current political divisions (in a qualified clarification through simplification manner). The name rather exaggerates the nationalist element of the revolution. The governments which came after 1908, ruling under an Ottoman dynasty reduced to a ceremonial role, were torn between Turkish nationalist, Ottomanist, and Islamist replacements for the personalised nature of Ottoman rule.

In this context Ottomanist refers to creating the idea of an Ottoman citizenship and shared institutions rather than restoring the political power of the dynasty. Variations on these ideas include Pan-Turkism/Turanism (the unity of Turkish peoples from the Great Wall of China to the Adriatic Sea) and a Dual Monarchy of Turks and Arabs modeled on the Habsburg Dual Monarchy of Austrians and Hungarians (that is the Habsburgs were Emperors of Austria in the Austrian lands and Kings of Hungary in the Magyar lands).

The move away from a patrimonial state based on the hereditary legitimacy of dynasties, who were not formally restricted by any laws or institutions, goes back to the Tanzimat edict of 1839, issued by Sultan Abdulmejid I in 1839, establishing administrative reforms and rights for Ottoman subjects of all religions. This might be taken as providing a model of moderate or even conservative constitutional reformism associated with the Young Ottoman thinkers and state servants. It has its roots in the reign of Mahmud II. Mahmud cleared the way for the reform process by the destruction of the Janissary Order, that is the military corps which had expanded into various areas of Ottoman life and was an important political force. The Tanzimat period led to the constitution and national assembly of 1876, which was suspended by Sultan Abdul II in 1878.

Abdul Hamit carried on with administrative reforms, of a centralised kind which were seen as compatible with his personal power, accompanied by war against rebellious Ottoman subjects of such a brutal kind that he became known as the Red Sultan. His status has been greatly elevated by President Erdoğan who evidently wishes to see himself as a follower of Abdul Hamit II, rather giving away his tendency to regard democracy and constitutionalism as adornments to be displayed when they can be bent and twisted to his end, rather than as intrinsic values. The brutality of Abdul Hamit II, the violent reactionary, was foreshadowed in the reformism of Mahmud II. His destruction of the arch-conservative corps of the Janissaries was a highly violent affair in which an Istanbul mutiny provoked by Mahmud was put down through the execution of prisoners who survived the general fighting.

In this sketch, I try to bring out the ways in which the Ottoman state used systematic violence to reform and to push back reform, when giving rights and when taking them away. There is no Ottoman constitutional tradition respecting the rights of all and the pre-republican changes were just as violent as the most extreme moments of the republican period.

The ‘millet system’ of self-governing religious communities under the Sultan was a retrospective idealisation of ways in which the Ottomans accommodated religious diversity, at the time the capacity of the state to have legitimacy over non-Muslim subjects was declining. Serbia started revolting in 1804, leading to self-government within the Empire in 1817, on the basis of national post-French Revolution, not the ‘millet’ tradition rooted in classical Muslim ideas of ‘protected’ minorities. The strength of modern nationalism in the Ottoman lands is confirmed by Greek Independence, internationally recognised in 1832, following a war in which western educated Greeks familiar with ideas of nationalism and sovereignty provided the ideology.

The republican national tradition in Turkey is sometimes seen as a fall away from Ottoman pluralism and therefore as regressive. The ‘regression’, as in the influence of nationalism and reconstruction of the Ottoman state through centralisation and centrally controlled violence, actually goes back much further. The Ottoman state was not able to find ways of accommodating the aspirations first of non-Muslim subjects then even of Muslim subjects outside Anatolia and Thrace. In this process the Ottoman state was step by step becoming what is now Turkey, based on the loyalty of mostly ethnic Turkish subjects, including Muslim refugees from break-away states who fled into Anatolia, and to some degree on the loyalty of Kurds in Anatolia to the Ottoman system. Antagonism towards Ottoman Armenians was one part of this.

To be continued

Law, Judgement, Republicanism

Barry Stocker Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , , ,

Draft material for a joint conference paper/Work in Progress on a long term project

This paper comes out of a long term project to work on ideas of liberty in relation to republicanism in political thought, along with issues of law and sovereignty. The paper in question here comes out of collaborative work on questions of law, judgement, and republicanism in relation to Turkey’s history and its current politics. Though this comes from collaborative work, I take sole responsibility for this iteration of draft material towards a joint conference paper, drafted with the needs of a blog with a broad audience in mind.

The starting point is in Immanuel Kant with regard to his view of law and judgement. His jurisprudence, mostly to be found in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals on ‘The Doctrine of Right’, is that of law based on morality, so is an alternative to legal positivism. The argument here is not to take his explicit jurisprudence as the foundation of legal philosophy. There is another way of looking at Kant’s jurisprudence which will be discussed soon. 

What is particularly valuable at this point is that Kant suggests an alternative to legal positivism and the Utilitarian ethics with which is has affinities, particularly in Jeremy Bentham. Legal positivism refers to a position in which laws are commands understood only as commands, with regard to some broader principles of justice. It is historically rooted in the idea of the political sovereign as the author of laws. Historically such a way of thinking about law was embedded in what is known to us as natural law, that is, ideas of universal rules of justice. This began with a very sacralised view of law as coming from the cosmos and divine, in which the sovereign is part of the divinely ordained laws. Over time this conception develops more into the idea of law as an autonomous institution resting on sovereign will. Positivism develops from such an idea of legal sovereignty, leaving no impediment to the sovereign will.

Kant’s understanding of morality leaves law rooted in ideas of rationality, universality, human community, autonomy, and individual ends which are central to Kant’s moral philosophy. The critique of legal positivism is necessary to understanding law in relation to politics and citizenship in ways which don’t leave a sovereign will with unlimited power over law. Kant’s view of judgement suggests a way of taking Kant’s morality and jurisprudence out of the idealist abstraction he tends towards. His philosophy of judgement can be found in the Critique of Judgement Power, divided into parts on aesthetic judgments of beauty and teleological judgments of nature.

The important aspect here is the aesthetic judgement, given political significance through the interpretation of Hannah Arendt. From Arendt we can take an understanding of Kant’s attempts at a moral basis for law, something that takes political judgement as an autonomous, though related, area. On this basis it can be said that the judgement necessary for there to be legal process, bringing particular cases under a universal rule, according to a non-deterministic subjective activity, on the model of Kant’s aesthetic judgement is at the root of politics.

Politics is a process of public judgement about particular cases in relation to the moral principles at the basis of politics. The making of laws is at the centre of the political process and the application of law in court should also have a public aspect. We can see a model of a kind in antiquity with regard to the minor citizen assembly, selected by lottery, serving as a jury in the law courts of ancient Athens. It is Roman law that tends to impose a state oriented view of law, in which the will of the sovereign is applied in a very absolutist way, so that in the end the Emperor is highest law maker and highest judge of the laws.

As Michel Foucault argues, and Montesquieu before him, the German tribes which took over Roman lands had more communal and less rigidly defined forms of court judgement, and were more concerned with negotiating social peace than applying laws rigidly to cases. Foucault showed how law always has some political significance with regard to the ways in which sovereignty works and power is felt. That is the law and the work of the courts is a demonstration of sovereignty, while punishment is concerned with the ways that sovereignty is embedded in power, and how that power is exercised on the body to form a kind of model subjugation to sovereignty. The Foucauldian perspective should not be one in which everything to do with the laws, the courts, and methods of punishment is an expression of politics narrowly understood.

The point is to understand sovereignty as whole, including the inseparability of institutions of justice from the political state. The accountability of the state and the accountability of justice must be taken together. Both should work in the context of public accessibility and public discussion. The ways in which laws, courts, and judges can be accountable to ideas of autonomy must be declared and debate. Courts should be understood as ways of addressing social harms and finding reconciliation rather than as the imposition of state-centric declarations of law.

Should The Academic “We” Be Ditched?

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty ,

“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.” – Mark Twain

When writing academically I use the “we” pronoun. I do so for a variety of reasons, but I am starting to rethink this practice. This may seem like a silly topic, but a quick google shows that I’m not the only one who thinks about this: link 1, link 2.

My K-12 teachers, and even my undergraduate English professor, constantly told me that I was prone to writing in a stream of consciousness. My writing, they argued, contained too much of my personality. They pointed out my constant use of “I”s of example of this. I I was, in general, an awful English student. In 12+ years of schooling, I rarely used the five page paragraph structure that American school children are indoctrinated with. I first adopted the use of the academic “we” in an attempt to force myself to distinguish between personal forms of writing, such as when I write on blogs, where these eccentricities could be tolerated and technical writing.

While that was my initial motivation for using the “we”, I also found the pronoun a way to emphasize the collaborative nature of science. I have several single authored papers, but I would be lying if I said that any of them were developed in a vacuum divorced from other’s feedback. Getting feedback at a conference or brown bag workshop may not merit including someone as a co-author, but I feel it strange to use “I” academically in this context. For anyone who disagrees with me – I ask that you compare a paper before and after submitting it to the review process. One may hate reviewer #2 for insisting on using an obscure estimation technique, but it cannot be denied that they shaped the final version of the paper. Again, I’m not saying we should add reviewers as co-authors, but isn’t using ‘we’ a simple way of acknowledging their role in the scientific process?

I admit, I also enjoy using the academic “we” in part because of its regal connections. King Michelangelo has a nice ring to it, no?

There are downsides to the use of the academic “we”. On several occasions I’ve had to clarify that I was the sole author of a given paper. What do NOL readers think? Do you use the academic “we”?

#microblog

Pakistan’s dynastic politics and the PML-N’s Sharif family

Tridivesh Singh Maini Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

As in other parts of South Asia, dynastic politics is an integral feature of Pakistan’s politics. Both the PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) and the PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) are essentially family-run political parties. While the PPP has been dominated by the Bhutto family, the PML-N has been dominated by the Sharif family.

Resentment against family domination in PML-N

In the recent past, there has been resentment against the rise of both Maryam Nawaz Sharif (daughter of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif) and Hamza Shehbaz, son of Shehbaz Sharif (PML-N party chief and younger brother of Nawaz Sharif).

The latest resignation from PML-N was that of Zaeem Qadri, once a confidante of Shehbaz Sharif, who was denied a seat for the NA-133 (an electoral constituency in Pakistan). Qadri used some harsh words for Hamza Shahbaz, saying ‘Hear Hamza Shahbaz! Lahore is neither your, nor your father’s property.’ Qadri also stated, that one of the reasons he did not get the ticket was that he did not possess adequate resources.

In the run up to the elections, internal dynamics of the PML-N, as well as the role of the Pakistan military, will be crucial (it has been lending tacit support to the opposition, to weaken the PML-N, especially in the party’s citadel of Punjab).

Dynastic politics and differences within the Sharif family

If one were to look at the resentment against Maryam Nawaz, only last year, Chaudhry Nisar, former Interior Minister, who does not share particularly cordial relations with the Sharifs, said that it is too premature to compare Maryam Nawaz with Benazir Bhutto. Said Nisar in an interview with Geo TV:

Comparing Maryam Nawaz to Benazir Bhutto is wrong […] Maryam Nawaz should understand and partake in practical politics. Only then can she be considered a leader.

Another minister, Saad Rafique, too had stated that Maryam Nawaz should be ‘cautious while addressing public meetings.’

Rivalry between Hamza Shehbaz and Maryam Nawaz

It has been argued that one of the main reasons for the strained relationship between Shahbaz Sharif and Nawaz Sharif was the rivalry between their children. After Nawaz was removed from Prime Ministership in July 2017, one of the reasons why Shahbaz (now the PM candidate) was not immediately appointed interim Prime Minister, as well as President of the PML-N, was that there was a clamor for Hamza Shahbaz as Chief Minister of Punjab and Nawaz’s family was not comfortable with an arrangement where both father and son would be powerful. Later on, Nawaz appointed Pervez Malik, instead of Hamza Shehbaz, as campaigner in charge for NA-120, which was fought by his wife Kulsoom Nawaz.

Military’s behind the scenes manuevres and defections

In recent months, the Pakistan army has been trying to engineer a number of defections from the PML-N to PTI, and even though the military shares a comfortable relationship with Shehbaz, as compared to Nawaz, it is believed that now they would be most comfortable with Imran Khan as PM. There have also been reports of the military not just arm twisting political leaders of the PML-N, but censoring the media as well. Whether the latest resignation was prompted by the military is in the realm of speculation of course.

The Army and Nawaz’ reaction to the resignation of Qadri

Interestingly, Qadri’s resignation may be welcomed not just by the military, since it would have come across as a setback to the PML-N, which is considered the dominant force in Punjab. In his heart of hearts, Shahbaz’ brother Nawaz too may not mind this, since it will not only clip Hamza’s wings but also weaken Shahbaz’ position to some extent. During his press conference, Qadri made a mention of Nawaz Sharif, saying that the Former PM had told Qadri that many within the PML-N were not happy with his presence in the party.

While the two brothers share a very strong rapport, in spite of temperamental differences in the past year, there has been a degree of friction. After Nawaz’ remarks on the Mumbai attacks, where he blamed Pakistan for delaying the trial of the accused, Shahbaz had to intervene, and apparently told Nawaz not to talk to the press without consulting Shehbaz. In an interview to the Dawn newspaper, Nawaz had said:

Militant organisations are active. Call them non-state actors, should we allow them to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai? Explain it to me […] Why can’t we complete the trial?

In spite of the differences within the PML-N, and some tensions between both brothers, there is a strong realization that the main crowd puller for the PML-N still remains Nawaz Sharif, and with the elder Sharif being in London due to his wife’s ill health (she has been on ventilator since June 14 2018) it is unlikely that he will be able to spearhead the campaign.

On the whole, defections like Qadri’s are not likely to have much of an impact on the prospects of the PML-N, given Nawaz’ charisma and goodwill, along with the fact that he is looked at as an individual who has taken on the army, and Shahbaz Sharif’s performance as Chief Minister. What will really be crucial is the success of the Pakistan military’s back door machinations, and to what extent will it go all out to back PTI Chief Imran Khan, who himself has been in the eye of a storm after a book written by his former wife and senior journalist, Reham Khan, has made some serious accusations against him, and could dent his prospects amongst certain sections.

Conclusion

It is in Pakistan’s interest that the 2019 election verdict results in the strengthening of the democratic set up. Apart from a dire need for change in the military’s mindset, political parties in Pakistan (like in other South Asian countries) too need to get their house in order and move beyond being family concerns. It is also important to have greater intraparty democracy.

Turkey after the Election

Barry Stocker Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

Grim Facts

Turkey held National Assembly and Presidential elections last Sunday (24th June). Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan won an overall majority of votes and retained the presidency without a second round of voting. The pro-Erdoğan electoral list of his AKP (Justice and Development Party/Adelet ve Kalkınma Partisi) and the older (the second oldest party in Turkey) but smaller MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi/Nationalist Action Party) took a majority of votes. The MHP took more votes than the breakaway Good Party (İYİ Parti/IP), though IP’s leader (Meral Akşener) is more popular than the MHP leader (Devlet Bahçeli) and the IP has more members.

The MHP broke through the 10% barrier to entry into the National Assembly in the votes cast for it, within the joint electoral list, though it was mostly expected to fall short by a distinct margin. Since the more moderate elements of the MHP joined IP, MHP forms part of a presidential majority in the National Assembly, with its authoritarian monolithic variety of nationalism unrestrained.

The main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi/CHP, a centre left and secularist-republican party), lost about one tenth of its National Assembly votes. The third party in the opposition electoral list, SP (Saadet Partisi/Felicity Party), a religious conservative party with the same roots as AKP, failed to get up to 1% in either the presidential or National Assembly elections, thus failing to increase its vote significantly and failing to take any notable fraction of the AKP vote.

CHP and then IP leaders failed to live up to promises to demonstrate outside the Supreme Election Council building in Turkey to protest against likely electoral rigging. Opposition data on voting gathered by election monitors ended up almost entirely coinciding with ‘official’ results (strictly speaking official results will not be available until 5th July) and earlier information is preliminary only.

Qualification of Grim Facts 

The above gives the bare facts about the results with regard to the most disappointing aspects from the point of view of the opposition. This is a disappointing result for anyone opposed to the authoritarian regime of Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, which began by appealing to supporters of reform in a country with rather limited liberalism in its democracy.

Erdoğan has since made it clear that he regards democracy as the unlimited power of one man who claims to represent the People against liberal, westernised, secularist, and leftist ‘elites’ and ‘marginals’, along with foreign and foreign manipulated conspiracies against the Nation.

One qualification to the bad news above is that the opposition during the election is fighting against bias, exclusion, threatening accusations, harassment, violence and legal persecution from the state apparatus, state media, private media effectively under state direction (which is most of the private media), and gangs of thugs, some armed. At the very least the opposition held its ground in terrible circumstances, which have been getting continuously worse for years.

Another ‘optimistic’ aspect is that while there was certainly some vote rigging of a kind it was difficult for opposition monitors to capture. This includes pre-marked voting ballots. As in last year’s referendum vote, videos of pre-marking of ballots have been circulating on social media.

In the referendum campaign the electoral authorities broke the law by accepting ballot papers which had not been stamped by a polling station official. This was legalised in time for the election and broadened to allow counting of ballot papers in unstamped envelopes.

Legal changes have also made it easier for state authorities to move polling stations and remove ballot boxes from polling stations to be counted elsewhere. On a less official level, reports indicate harassment of voters by armed gangs and some employers requiring evidence from a phone camera photograph of voting for the government.

There have been problems for decades with polling stations (especially in areas where the opposition does not send monitors because of a small local base) ignoring opposition votes and recording ‘100%’ for the party in control of the state at the time.

It is very difficult to know what the overall number of votes is changed by these malpractices. It is, however, clear that the southeast of the country (that is the Kurdish majority region) is much more vulnerable to such practices because of the atmosphere created by PKK (far left Kurdish autonomy terrorist/insurgent group) and the security-state counter operations.

The main Kurdish identity party, the leftist HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi/Peoples’ Democratic Party), competes with the AKP for first place in the southeast. It is regularly accused of supporting PKK terrorism and even of being an organic part of the PKK in government oriented media and legal cases opened by highly politicised state prosecutors.

There is certainly overlap between PKK sympathisers and HDP supporters, but ‘evidence’ that the HDP supports terrorism consists of statements calling for peace, criticising security operations against the PKK and it’s Syrian partner (PYD), and criticising state policy towards the PKK. Whatever one might think of the HDP’s policies and statements, these are not evidence that it is a terrorist organisation. The idea that it is legitimises official harassment (including imprisonment) and less officials forms of intimidation and vote rigging. It also legitimises less widespread but very real harassment of the CHP on the grounds that some supporters voted HDP to get is past the 10% thresh hold and, in a limited and very moderate way, the CHP has expressed some sympathy for persecuted HDP leaders and activists.

I can only make guesses but I think it is reasonable to estimate that 1% of votes have been historically manipulated and that this has increased along with the strengthening grip of the AKP on the state and parts of civil society, and also with its increasing demonisation of opposition.

I’ll estimate 3% for the votes manipulated.

Election evening results indicated just over 53% for Erdoğan as president and for the electoral list backing him. This has however been going down as later ‘preliminary’ results so it may now be about 52% for both votes. In this case, if 3% of votes are manipulated (a very sober estimate in my view) then we could be looking at 49% for Erdoğan and his supporters. This might still give a slight majority in the National Assembly, as distribution of seats is biased towards rural and small town conservative areas, and since 100% of votes are not represented by seats in the National Assembly in even the most pure form of proportional representation (because there are always some micro-parties which get some votes but do not enter the National Assembly).

A run-off for president after Erdoğan gets 49% seems very likely to still set up Erdoğan as the winner in the second round. It is of course wrong in principle to rig at this level but it doesn’t change anything important presuming rigging is at the level I’ve suggested. I will have a clearer idea about this when all results are officially released on 5th July.

On further relatively good news, the CHP vote in the presidential election was at 30%, about one fifth higher than before.

The presidential candidate Muharrem İnce turned out to be an inspiring campaigner and public speaker able to appeal to a variety of sections of Turkish society. He seems like a natural fit for the leadership of CHP, though so far the incumbent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has been slow to step down and clear the way.,

The final results seem likely to show at least a slight decline for Erdoğan since the 2014 presidential election. IP is new and has no local government base. As there are local elections at the end of March next year, they should be able to establish local strongholds and build on that nationally.

The AKP does not have a majority in the National Assembly for the first time since 2002. MHP makes up the majority at present and as stated above seems likely to behave in a very nationalist-authoritarian way. However, its vote seems to have been increased by disaffected AKP voters (particularly in the southeast) who are not ready, so far, to vote against Erdoğan and a pro-Erdoğan electoral list. This makes their support rather unstable and the MHP is likely to see advantage in turning away from Erdoğan at some point, or at least cause him trouble by asserting its independence. Erdoğan is not someone to welcome, or live with, this kind of division in his support bloc and a conflict of some kind seems likely at some point.

Separation of Children: an American Tradition

Fred Foldvary History, Liberty , , , , ,

Many Americans deplore the forced separation of children from their parents when they attempt an unauthorized entry into the USA. The recorded crying of children traumatized from having their parents taken away is terrible to hear for anyone with empathy. Administrations excuse this by claiming that they are only enforcing a legally mandated zero tolerance, that this separation acts as a useful deterrent to immigration, and that the law is ordained by God.

The claim by those opposing this policy is that this cruel separation is un-American. But in fact, the forced separation of children is an American tradition. Under slavery prior to the end of the Civil War, children were sold separately from their parents. This action too was presumably a law ordained by God.

The separation of children from their parents was also imposed on native American Indians. Children were forcibly removed from their homes and put into boarding schools, the aim being the assimilation of Indians into Euro-American culture. Indian children were not allowed to speak in their native languages. Rather than being un-American, this physical and cultural separation was seen as an Americanization. Canada had a similar program for its Indians.

This separation continued the genocide of Indians by having a high rate of death. The misery that children felt in their familial and cultural separation was compounded by abusive treatment and a high mortality rate.

Since the current child separation is a continuation of past policies, we can expect similar outcomes: abuse, death, and suicides. Feeling no hope of ever seeing their parents again, confined to small cages, suffering from boredom, and constantly hearing other children crying, there could be substantial illness and even suicide in these detention camps. It would at first be covered up, and then exposed, and denied as “fake news.”

This anti-family policy is supported by many Republicans and conservatives. The conservative claim of supporting “family values” has now been shown to be fake. The real conservative stance is the imposition of traditional European culture and supremacy. Most of the migrants from Central America and Mexico are of native Indian ancestry. When they are rejected and sent back to their home countries to get killed by the violence from which they fled, this is in accord with the American tradition of European racial supremacy over native American Indians. If those seeking to immigrate were Norwegians, those families would not be split up.

Indeed, those subjected to forced family separation were races that were conquered and regarded as inferior. A large immigration from Mexico and Central America would repopulate the USA with native Indian “blood,” unacceptable to Euro-American supremacists.

Therefore the forced separation of native Indians from their parents and the rejection of further immigration is as American as one could get.

Why protect speech?

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

The U.S. Supreme Court has extended more protection for speech than other major courts that adjudicate rights, such as the European Court of Human of Rights. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court is frequently wrong about why speech deserves constitutional protection. That error has undermined the First Amendment that the Court purports to protect. Continue reading →

The TSA Wins

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , , ,

Since 2012 I have been a semi-frequent flyer making about five cross continental round trip flights a year, plus several shorter flights within the Pacific coast. Between now and then I would make it a point to ‘opt out’ of the standard TSA procedure and receive the pat down. I did it for a variety of reasons. For one, don’t like being exposed to radiation and don’t trust the government on the issue.

More than that though, I wanted to resist and encourage my fellow citizens to resist, however small, the security theater the government has us go through in exchange for our freedom to travel. I would not encourage people to resist the police or any armed agent of the state, but by opting out I was taking a stand against government and hoped others would join me.

In five plus years, no one did. The only people I ever had join me in the opt out process was ‘randomly selected’ individals, often Muslims or mis-identified Sikhs. I never saw someone else voluntarily opt out. In retrospect, I suspect noone else saw my actions as a form of protest.

When I took a flight earlier today I went through the standard procedure.* My will to resist, at least in this form, has gone away. In the coming year the TSA rules will become stricter as real ID is finally implemented. I like to think this will lead to popular opposition, but I wouldn’t wager on it. As a nation we’ve given up on asserting our freedom to travel with minimal intrusion.

When I arrived at my final destination I found the below containers blocking me from the entrance. To leave the airport I had to get checked one last time. They don’t seem to be scanners, but when you enter them you are held up for ten or so seconds before being let free. Are they just trying to see what we will put up with before unveiling the next wave of security theater antics?

Thoughts? Have a story about your flying experience(s) to share? Post in the comments below.

___

*Funnily enough I ended up being “randomly” choosen to have my luggage physically inspected anyway.

Meat-y Twitter Spat: Choice, Vegetarianism and Caste in India

Shree Agnihotri Culture, Liberty , , , , ,

A couple of weeks ago I was in the middle of submission week (when am I not?). Obviously, an otherwise mundane tweet piqued my supremely scattered mind’s ever-shifting interest. The series of tweets argued that unless one had actually tasted meat, she was not a vegetarian by choice but a vegetarian by caste. It seemed a silly proposition to me. It seemed as silly as claiming that unless one has lived off meat for a year, she is a meat eater by caste, not by choice. Urban Indian Vegetarians (towards whom the tweets were directed) do not live in an either-or world; their individual judgments, howsoever influenced by the household they were born in, do not flicker between ‘my caste dictates I must not eat meat’ and ‘my taste buds like/dislike meat’. Between the orthodox social and the over simplified gustatory lies an ocean of personal judgments.

In response to my tweets, I was told I was missing the context, that upper caste Hindus were vegetarians because of a puranical belief in the impurity of meat. Sure, I said. If I look down upon a meat eater from some ill-founded moral high ground, I am nothing but a bigot who deserves to be called out. If, however, I chose to stick to my greens without ever experiencing the delight that is a chicken butter masala but have no qualms with you eating pork, what seems to be the problem?

Like a number of judgments we make (moral or otherwise), food preferences are also influenced by the environment we grow up in. But does mean that a child’s food preferences are motivated by the same reasons as her ancestors? People from coastal areas prefer seafood. While their ancestors might have preferred a healthy diet of fish over okra for any number of reasons (Religion? Caste? Sheer affordability?), could the children, as individuals capable of making free-standing judgments exposed to very different environments, take a liking for fish for completely different reasons, unaware and independent of their ancestors’?

Can contextualizing discount generalisations? We have consensus on contextualizing not working out well for Trump and his feelings for Mexicans how much ever the Mexican drug lords might have contributed to the law and order situation in America. Mexicans do not become rapists because of their identity. Muslims do not turn into terrorists because of their identity. The logic of it seems pretty clear. Can we then derive a principle from this consensus? Context does not justify identity based generalisations. Casteism is a very real problem in India. But no matter what the context, you are wrong if you think you have the qualification to approve of someone’s personal choices. Calls for contextualization seem like an attempt to sweep social-identity-based generalisations under the rug – the very thing that brought about casteism in the first place.

Identity based stratification is a very real problem across the world. The trick is not to demonize the identity but call out the dehumanizing ideology that is functioning in that group. My Jewish friends can choose to go Kosher for any number of reasons, as long as they don’t demonize the rest of us. My white friends are not racists if they are attracted towards other white people. And my gay friend need not sleep with a person of the opposite gender to prove that his choice of life partner is not influenced by his lesbian moms. Choice, by definition, means having an alternative option. Not exercising all the alternatives is a prerogative and it does not take away from the legitimacy of your choice.

But this forms only a minuscule percentage of the replies I got to my tweets. Most just called me an Upper Caste {insert abuse}. I soon realized this was not a debate on what prompts vegetarianism in India. This was a statement. And I, by virtue of my social identity, was not eligible to comment on it. Makes me wonder – the politics of identity is like an hourglass. One side will always lose as long as you continue to use something as tricky as sand as a parameter. I will turn more academic in my series on Arendt where I evaluate her take on identity (because I was also told that Arendt would want us to contextualize and I humbly disagree). I will discuss Arendt on collective identity, her idea of what it meant to separate ‘the political’ from ‘the social’, and finally, identity politics.

P.S: Stepping out of your echo chamber is really bad for your twitter notification bar. Excellent for the follower count though.

The State in education – Part III: Institutionalization of learning

Mary Lucia Darst History, Liberty , , ,

In The State in education – Part II: social warfare, we looked at the promise of state-sponsored education and its failure, both socially and as a purveyor of knowledge. The next step is to examine the university, especially since higher education is deeply linked to modern society and because the public school system purports to prepare its students for college.

First, though, there should be a little history on higher education in the West for context since Nietzsche assumed that everyone knew it when he made his remarks in Anti-Education. The university as an abstract concept dates to Aristotle and his Peripatetic School. Following his stint as Alexander the Great’s tutor, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened a school at the Lyceum (Λύκειον) Temple. There, for a fee, he provided the young men of Athens with the same education he had given Alexander. On a side note, this is also a beautiful example of capitalist equality: a royal education was available to all in a mutually beneficial exchange; Aristotle made a living, and the Athenians received brains.

The Lyceum was not a degree granting institution, and only by a man’s knowledge of philosophy, history, literature, language, and debating skills could one tell that he had studied at the Lyceum. A cultural premium on bragging rights soon followed, though, and famous philosophers opening immensely popular schools became de rigueur. By the rise of Roman imperium in the Mediterranean around 250 BC, Hellenic writers included their intellectual pedigrees, i.e. all the famous teachers they had studied with, in their introductions as a credibility passport. The Romans were avid Hellenophiles and adopted everything Greek unilaterally, including the concept of the lyceum-university.

Following the Dark Ages (and not getting into the debate over whether the time was truly dark or not), the modern university emerged in 1088, with the Università di Bologna. It was more of a club than an institution; as Robert S. Rait, mid-20th century medieval historian, remarked in his book Life in the Medieval University, the original meaning of “university” was “association” and it was not used exclusively for education. The main attractions of the university as a concept were it was secular and provided access to books, which were prohibitively expensive at the individual level before the printing press. A bisection of the profiles of Swedish foreign students enrolled at the Leipzig University between 1409 and 1520 shows that the average male student was destined either for the clergy on a prelate track or was of noble extraction. As the article points out, none of the students who later joined the knighthood formally graduated, but the student body is indicative of the associative nature of the university.

The example of Lady Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman to receive a doctoral degree, awarded by the University of Padua in 1678, illuminates the difference between “university” at its original intent and the institutional concept. Cornaro wrote her thesis independently, taking the doctoral exams and defending her work when she and her advisor felt she was ready. No enrollment or attendance at classes was necessary, deemed so unnecessary that she skipped both the bachelor and masters stages. What mattered was that a candidate knew the subject, not the method of acquisition. Even by the mid-19th century, this particular path remained open to remarkable scholars, such as Nietzsche since Leipzig University awarded him his doctorate on the basis of his published articles, rather than a dissertation and defense.

Education’s institutionalization, i.e. the focus shifting more from knowledge to “the experience,” accompanied a broader societal shift. Nietzsche noted in Beyond Good and Evil that humans have an inherent need for boundaries and systemic education played a very prominent role in contemporary man’s processing of that need:

There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything else, is a sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence that allows us to infer noble origins and habits. The refinement, graciousness, and height of a soul is dangerously tested when something of the first rank passes by without being as yet protected by the shudders of authority against obtrusive efforts and ineptitudes – something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps capriciously concealed and disguised, like a living touchstone. […] Much is gained once the feeling has finally been cultivated in the masses (among the shallow and in the high-speed intestines of every kind) that they are not to touch everything; that there are holy experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep away their unclean hands – this is almost their greatest advance toward humanity. Conversely, perhaps there is nothing about so-called educated people and believers in “modern ideas” that is as nauseous as their lack of modesty and the comfortable insolence in their eyes and hands with which they touch, lick, and finger everything [….] (“What is Noble,” 263)

The idea the philosopher pursued was the notion that university attendance conveyed the future right to “touch, lick, and finger everything,” a very graphic and curmudgeonly way of saying that a certain demographic assumed unjustified airs.

Given that in Anti-Education, Nietzsche lamented the fragmentation of learning into individual disciplines, causing students to lose a sense of the wholeness, the universality of knowledge, what he hated in the nouveau educated, if we will, was the rise of the pseudo-expert – a person whose knowledge was confined to the bounds of a fixed field but was revered as omniscient. The applicability of Socrates’ dialogue with Meno – the one where teacher and student discuss human tendency to lose sight of the whole in pursuit of individual strands – to the situation was unmistakable, something which Nietzsche, a passionate classicist, noticed. The loss of the Renaissance learning model, the trivium and the quadrivium, both of which emphasize an integrated learning matrix, carried with it a belief that excessive specialization was positive; it was a very perverse version of “jack of all trades, master of none.” As Nietzsche bemoaned, the newly-educated desired masters without realizing that all they obtained were jacks. In this, he foreshadowed the disaster of the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and the consequences of Woodrow Wilson’s unwholesome belief in “experts.”

The philosopher squarely blamed the model of the realschule, with its clear-cut subjects and predictable exams, for the breakdown between knowledge acquisition and learning. While he excoriated the Prussian government for basing all public education on the realschule, he admitted that the fragmentation of the university into departments and majors occurred at the will of the people. This was a “chicken or the egg” situation: Was the state or broader society responsible for university learning becoming more like high school? This was not a question Nietzsche was interested in answering since he cared more about consequences. However, he did believe that the root was admitting realschule people to university in the first place. Since such a hypothesis is very applicable today, we will examine it in the contemporary American context next.

Is minimalism immoral?

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty , , ,

I came across a simple but important question on Quora: Is it wrong to aspire to be a minimalist? Doesn’t this negatively affect the country’s GDP?

I see two big lessons here: 1) wise use of metrics requires wisdom… i.e. appropriate interpretation and critical thinking. 2) Maximization is just one version of one part of the whole story. (There are also important questions to ask about what we can expect from others, but I’ll leave that for the comments.)

Readers of NOL should be familiar with the notion that GDP is only an imperfect proxy for well being. But not everyone is so we have to repeat ourselves. There’s what we’re after, and there’s what we can measure, and the two are not the same. GDP is a really clever way to aggregate total production in an economy, but production is only valuable to the extent we’re producing the things that actually improve people’s lives. It’s easy for busy people to confuse a proxy measure for the latent variable we actually care about, so we need someone whispering in the emperor’s ear “the metric is not the mission.”

Economics is easier to describe using the simplifying assumption that people want more stuff. It’s easy to forget that people also want more leisure (and so less work). This is a subtle reappearance of the seen and unseen. We can see when someone gets a cool new car and we can’t see when someone has a fun evening with friends and family. We have to check our bias towards trying to get more stuff and remember that reducing work is another feature of human flourishing.

Turkey elections: Elections, Rappers, Media, Micro-Party, Rigging, Iraq

Barry Stocker Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

The Turkish State’s War On Rap

The election campaign has not slowed down the Erdoğanist state in its efforts to punish anyone who deviates from Erdoğan’s ideal of obedient, socially conservative, and conformist citizens. One of the best known Turkish rappers, Ezhel, with very leftist and counter culture lyrics, has been arrested recently for ‘encouraging drug use’. A prosecutor ordered his detention, which was implemented after he voluntarily went to the police station to answer a ‘complaint’, with no warning about detention. Onur Dinç (known as Khontkar), and Young Bego have also been detained. They can all be found on Spotify and YouTube. Listening on Spotify generates a little income for people who deserve a bit of solidarity at the moment.

İnce’s Presidential Campaign

An interview on HaberTürk TV with the leading opposition candidate for President of Turkey, Muharrem İnce (from the secularist, centre-left Republican People’s Party), has gone down very well. The interviewers let İnce express his views and had a selfie with him afterwards. HaberTürk TV is a private channel but, like all commercial private channels, accepts (and has no real choice) the biases and silences imposed by the Erdoğanist-AKP regime.

It is normal for Erdoğan himself to phone media groups and complain about coverage, demanding firings of journalists, where the bias is not as complete as he requires. So how long are these journalists, and the responsible manager, going to survive? A manager on another private channel was fired (officially ‘left for personal reasons’, ha ha ha) after allowing a very brief segment on the second most popular opposition, and more right wing, candidate, Meral Akşener. Will these HaberTürk people survive until the election? Are they more willing to push the limits because the opposition is doing better than expected?

On recent polls (leaving aside companies who enjoy close relations with the Erdoğanists) only rigging (or some extreme situation) can now stop 1. the opposition winning a majority in the National Assembly (could be stopped on current polling by stealing/losing about 2/3% points from HDP, a Kurdish rights-leftist party which appears to be between 1 and 3% points above the 10% election threshold). The main left-right opposition list seems to be about 3 points behind the right wing government list 2. the presidential election going to a second round, i.e. Erdoğan cannot get 50%+ of the vote in a several-candidate field (except by rigging at least 7% points of votes cast) and might lose in the run off.

I can only presume the interviewers of İnce will be out of a job if Erdoğan and the AKP-dominated electoral list do win by some means, and HaberTürk will suffer other penalties. Yes, polls can be wrong and they don’t all show the same thing, but those most favourable to the government tend to be run by cronies and there is widespread suspicion that in the current atmosphere in Turkey, some voters would prefer not to tell a stranger they are voting for an opposition party, particularly HDP. This is confirmed by the relation between opinion polls and the final result in last year’s referendum on moving to a presidential system (in which the final result itself may have been affected by losing and faking ballots, and by the difficulty that many voters in the Kurdish southeast had with getting to polling stations, a tactic the regime is setting up for this time as well).

The AKP-Erdoğanist Media Strategy: Why Turkish Media promotes an ex-terrorist micro-party.

Presenting the Opposition

Following on from the above, though İnce gets a lot less coverage on all media, including state media which is legally required to provide balanced coverage, than Erdoğan for the Presidential campaign, he gets far more than the more nationalist-conservative opposition candidate Meral Akşener (who would be the first female President of the Republic). She is polling behind İnce, but mostly by a moderate margin. She receives almost no coverage, her campaign is in fact a completely banned subject in the Erdoğan-controlled media (that is all state media and all the major private media groups).

Clearly the Erdoğan strategy (and we can be sure that he dictates it, without any delegation of overall strategy to campaign organisers) is to promote İnce as the only opposition candidate, in the belief that Akşener is a more of a threat to conservative support for himself. I used to believe this, but as far as we can tell from polls, İnce is leading in the first round and would do as well as Akşener in a second round play-off, both going down to very narrow defeat. This strategy has a high chance of backfiring by enabling someone further from Erdoğan in politics to become President.

The media manipulations may not make much difference since people open to voting for the opposition are going to treat the Erdoğanist media with scepticism and seek other news sources, but it is at least worth noting what the strategy is. It might be that the main aim is to make electors forget that Akşener’s party İYİ (Good) exists, on a common list with İnce’s party, but voters for the list can choose between them. It is unlikely that many voters are unaware of Akşener, the İYİ party, and the common list, and those that are unaware must be hardcore Erdoğanists who will not switch support to anyone in this election for any reason.

Promoting a Micro-Party

The most bizarre aspect of Erdoğanist coverage of the elections is that Hür Dava Partisi receives a great deal more coverage than İYİ. Hür Dava Partisi means Free Cause Party and the Turkish name is usually contracted to Hürda Partisi or Hüda Par. It was founded by people who had supported the Kurdish religious terrorist group Hizbollah. This is nothing to do with Hizbollah in Lebanon, which is a Shi’a group. Hizbollah in Turkey is defunct and was Sunni Muslim, as is Hüda Par.

It advocates religious law in Turkey and operates only in southeastern provinces where ethnic Kurds are in a majority, and has no more than 5% support in any individual province, giving it overall less than 5% in the whole region and less than 1% in the whole country. For it to receive much election coverage is of course absurd. The reason this happens is in the hope that the more religious Kurdish voters who are dissatisfied with the AKP after voting for it in the past (AKP is the second party in the region) will vote for Hüda Par instead of the secular-leftist HDP, which is the leading party in the region. The aim is to keep the HDP vote below 10% nationally, the electoral threshold for the National Assembly.

I don’t think it is possible that Hüda Par can soak up those votes sufficiently, but from the Erdoğanist point of view, it is worth trying and might just keep HDP below 10% in conjunction with electoral trickery such as moving polling stations away from HDP areas to make it less easy for them to vote and the possibility of outright electoral fraud, particularly in those polling stations where opposition observers may not turn up, in remote very pro-AKP areas. Electoral law has been changed recently to make removal of ballot boxes by the police easier and to legalise the illegal decision of the Supreme Election Council to count unstamped ballot papers in last year’s referendum.

On current polling, the opposition electoral list is a few percentage points behind the Erdoğanist list, so keeping the HDP out of the National Assembly would give his list an overall majority. This is why a micro-party of extreme religious conservative Kurds gets a high level of coverage in the Turkish media compared with conservative nationalists in İYİ who oppose Erdoğan and have created the third largest party in Turkey in terms of opinion polling.

Resisting Electoral Fraud

The possibility of electoral fraud and the use of fraud to keep HDP out of the National Assembly to the advantage of the Erdoğanists has of course been noted by the opposition and they are co-operating to work against this. The electoral list which comprises the second, third, and fourth parties in Turkey (secular centre-left CHP, nationalist conservative İP, and religious conservative SP) is cooperating with the HDP in a platform to ensure a fair and accurate count of votes. That the more nationalist parts of the opposition list and the Kurdish autonomy leftist people are able to work together on this is itself a good sign. There are no guarantees that the platform can prevent decisive fraud, but at least it will make fraud more difficult and shows there is unity in a very diverse opposition against the AKP-Erdoğan abuse of power.

Iraq Surprise?

I’ve seen a report that Turkish army units in the Kurdistan Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which have been stationed in a mountainous border part of the region for some years by ‘invitation’ (or possibly in reality extreme pressure), are moving closer to the PKK (Kurdish separatist and extreme left terrorists of Turkey) base in Kandil. Kandil is in the mountains and provides obvious difficulties for an army aiming to destroy the PKK. It is inherently difficult to observe, fire on, occupy, and completely control a mountainous region. It is a certainty that the PKK has contingency plans to move its base through the mountain, dispersing it if necessary.

I cannot predict if the Turkish Armed Forces will attack the Kandil base soon, or if it can succeed in a mixture of eradication and control. The PKK is a dangerous terrorist organisation and should be eliminated, but whether it can be eliminated in practice, without lessening the reasons some Turkish Kurds want to fight for it (very misguided people in my view) is another matter.

What I can say at the moment is I won’t be surprised if there is an offensive against Kandil before the election on June 24th, particularly if polling shifts against Erdoğan and his electoral list, or if the Turkish lira resumes its decline against foreign currencies. The consequences, militarily and political, are not matters I can think through at present.